Blog #2

As Dr. Knapp and I are both in roughly the third month of our research, we are finding out more in depth just exactly what data mining in customer analytics really is. In my last post I talk about how broad the topic is and how we want to define our scope. At first, we thought it would be interesting to focus on financial markets because it ties directly with my field and my future employment, however, upon our research we found that although financial markets is interesting, we thought our audience would find it more appealing to look into customer-based research in which companies makes business decisions based on data findings. We also decided it would be a good idea to interview many of the professors in both marketing and economics here at Pace because many of them have worked in these fields and have performed research similar to our topic.

Something that an interviewee told me that helped put this very broad topic into context was the well-known Beer and Diapers example. Researchers have found that when men go to stores to purchase diapers, they are also likely to buy beer simultaneously. From examining this, organizations have started to place their beer near the diapers in the supermarkets to push this predicted outcome. It goes to show that companies use research methods to make better business decisions that will ultimately create greater revenue. Many questions arise as we focus on these points during our research. For example, we want to look more into how companies use date on customers to make suggestions to them based on their interests. We want to explore the approach to the pool of data researchers go in to to extract the information about customers based on their previous purchases, location, interests, etc. I hope to work with Dr. Knapp in looking into our unanswered questions before this semester ends through more research from databases as well as interviews with professors and other specialists in marketing research that will be beneficial to our study.